Honey Is a Sweet, Sticky, Yellow Substance Made by Bees?

I apologise for the cover design of this issue! It is nobody’s fault but my own. After a hard-working day, I could not resist creating this artwork based on the maps produced for the first article of volume 98. The cover was meant as a tribute to the immense effort invested by the authors, but it somehow went out of control. Forgive me for the playful cover…I will never do it again! Complaints should be directed only to me! So, now we start the 2021 Bee World volume with a look around the world.

The world honey bee health report is the most recent addition to a sporadic series of articles that have been published in Bee World by various authors since 1988. Humberto Boncristiani, James D. Ellis, and their colleagues from the University of Florida in Gainesville raise the bar for this series even higher: Instead of simply presenting a complete range of maps, they made a website that can be regularly updated. The accompanying article, therefore, could possibly be the last of its kind. Jamie Ellis has made a name for himself in the bee world. First, he is an editorial board member of this journal and a member of the IBRA management team. He also co-authored the preceding article in 2005 together with Pamela Munn, former editor of Bee World. Why is the information in this article important? I remember Jamie Ellis telling me once that he sees the maps he produced for the 2005 edition of this report at every conference, often without receiving appropriate credit. The knowledge about the occurrence of honey bee pests is not restricted, but compiling these data, which includes digging through the literature and searching for reliable sources, as well as regularly updating this information, is a lot of work. Now this compilation is available for use by everyone who does presentations in beekeeping education or needs an introductory slide for a study on bee pathogens. In this way, we hope the team can receive credit they deserve!

By the way, print-issue readers: Have you noticed that Bee World feels thicker? Yes, Bee World is increasing its volume page range from 128 to 144 pages, resulting in four additional pages per issue. Last year, we also introduced a new article section entitled ‘Forum’. In this section, articles that express a strong opinion on a certain topic can be published. This allows discussions in a more controversial or colloquial atmosphere than in other article types. Ideally, we establish a culture of reflecting on current topics in apiculture, presenting strong opinions, which are not necessarily the only valid points of view. In this issue, the topic of honey quality, standards and origin is reflected in four forum articles.

Honey is a sweet, sticky, yellow substance made by bees – the title of this editorial echoes the Cambridge Dictionary definition, but we know that the legislation of honey criteria and standards is more complex. The article by IBRA management team member Martin Kunz kicks off our discussion: Do current honey standards discriminate against non-European honeys made by species other than the Western honey bee? Martin describes an actual event that shows how difficult it is to import and market Apis dorsata honey. Arne Dübecke and Stephan Schwarzinger continue this topic and provide more information about the origin honey needs to be ready for import into the European Union. They also describe how difficult it is to create international markets, for example, for the long-consumed pot-honey. Veronika Bugarova and Juraj Majtan from the Slovak Academy of Sciences ask why the antimicrobial activity of honey is not considered as an official quality criterion for honey. Based on the two preceding articles, consumers could buy a product that is de jure honey, but the antimicrobial enzyme activity – an often-appraised asset of honey – is absent. To quote Dübecke and Schwarzinger: It turns out that honey is actually a very complicated product.

Honey adulteration is a big topic in the market, and not just since 40% of the honey samples presented at Apimondia 2019 in Montreal that were supposed to qualify for the world’s best honeys were rejected after being subjected to a thorough laboratory analysis. After hearing about such outcome, my feeling is that we can be glad we have sophisticated analytical methods to recognize low-quality honeys. But are these analytical methods validated and fair? Ole Kilpinen and Flemming Vejsnæs from the Danish Beekeepers Association challenged two analytical companies. Their report evokes doubts in the power of some methods. This highlights the importance of research on honey quality and authenticity and underlines the fact that this research is never finished, just like the arms race between doping hunters and dopers in sports.

Norman Carreck, COLOSS executive committee member, gives us an update on the achievements of the non-profit honey bee research association COLOSS. This association not only gained more substantial funding, which allows them to sustain their networking efforts for many more years, but they also held their first online conference. The article also contains the full proceedings of this conference, including 33 research abstracts, as supplementary material.

Man has destroyed many ecosystems. Ortrud Barth and her colleagues from Rio de Janeiro present a report on how native stingless bees could help to restore bush and tree vegetation around favelas by pollinating wild plants. They cite further evidence that bees normally forage specifically on a few plant species in rich environments and are only forced to become generalists when food is scarce.

Just two issues ago, Bee World published a review on the history of beekeeping in Papua New Guinea. The article by Anneliese Austin and her colleagues from Southern Cross University, Australia, is the sequel to this review article. They conducted key informant interviews to identify barriers that women encounter when participating in beekeeping.

We close this issue with a report on observations on long-term memory made by Nimish B. Vyas, Amanda D. Plunkett and Diana Baker from the United States.

In this issue, the word world in Bee World is well-deserved! We present one of the largest efforts to depict honey bee pests and pathogens on a global scale, bees washed up on an American beach, a report from stingless bees used in South America to restore deforested areas, the first global online conference of honey bee researchers, women beekeeping in Oceania and deal with quality issues related to the most highly appreciated bee product – the sticky, yellow substance called honey.

Have a good year!